I have never played any version of the pen and paper D&D game in my life. I never had anyone to play with. But I was fascinated by the rulebooks for the first edition game and I bought them all when I was a kid.
I don't really want to play the game, but I've bought the core books just to read them and in some cases so that I could better understand the computer games that I do play, and because I usually enjoy the art.
4th Edition, I downloaded. I don't even remember where I got them. The books are very different as a product with every new release farther away from the old TSR products that I remember. I was really glad that I didn't pay for the new books. Everything about 4th edition D&D seems just an exercise in reaching new levels of lameness.
Personal printers are horribly unreliable and very expensive to maintain.
For as much as tuition costs these days, and for the fact that many schools assess a "Technology fee" on top of tuition, I think computer labs and printers on campus should absolutely be present.
Someone who lives off campus isn't going to want to cart their notebook around everyplace they go, and I know from experience that it's a lot easier to get work done in a distraction-free computer lab, compared to a noisy dorm room.
The crackers themselves are generally cool, I will agree, but there are some corners of the Internets that can get your PC in some seriously obnoxious shit if you aren't careful.
Basically, PC gaming is so massively unappealing at this point to me not because I need the latest hardware or to fiddle with drivers, but because I can't stand the copy protection on retail (packaged) games and what they might be doing to my PC, I can't tolerate Steam and its reliance on servers I may or may not have access to when I want to play, or cracked games, with the disturbing implications for PC security that come from non-official packages. Those three things don't leave me with a whole lot of options, especially since I hate console game control systems.
I bought Interstate '76, but it wouldn't work on any PC that had more than one optical drive, something that was never corrected. I loved the Mechwarrior games and I probably still have the disc.
Try being a dial up user with a retail packaged copy of Half Life 2 that, according to the installer, would require 10 days of continuous, uninterrupted downloading through Steam before it could actually install and play.
Yes, really.
I'm sure it's much better now but just the fact that Steam installs and wants to be resident full-time on a PC is enough to keep me away from it, let alone the hilarity that is trying to have a LAN party when Steam's authentication servers are down.
I really do wish there were a way to enjoy some of Valve's titles on a PC without having to deal with their distribution shit. I've still never played Half Life 2.
I don't believe that's correct. NT4 had alpha-native code for the OS and as I recall Digital offered some software to translate x86 binaries into Alpha-native system calls in roughly the same way that WINE stuff runs Windows now.
I used to support Alphas and Motorola systems on NT4, and I did get to see a beta build of Windows 2000 on an Alpha at least once.
Historically, CoX has a very low churn rate compare to other MMOs. Many of the players are "lifers" who started when the game came out and won't be leaving until the last server is shut down.
CoX has a very user friendly gameplay and excellent text-based chat, and those things are really appealing to some people.
Champions, on the other hand, looks far too much like a console game for me to take it seriously.
That is my understanding as well. Current Via chips are extensions of the Centaur design. Cyrix was a technological dead end that didn't even own any fabrication facilities. Name brand had to be the only valuable thing they had.
I've been using Windows 7 on my Thinkpad for the last three weeks or so, and I've got a laundry list of bugs, issues and comments, and ironically one of the things that's broken in the beta release is the fucking "send feedback" feature.
I signed up for Microsoft Connect, and I still don't see any obvious way to submit bug reports. Maybe I have to be using IE or something.
And it's not like I haven't gotten Windows Updates in those three weeks. I think they don't really want any actual feedback. They're getting positive notes from the media, and Windows 7 will undoubtedly be far less reviled than Vista deservedly is, but the public beta has been out for a while; it's not like they could escape the fact that no one can send them bug reports.
I really think the fact that the "Send Feedback" button that's on every single open window in Windows 7 beta does not actually allow feedback to be sent is a deliberate move on the part of Microsoft.
No kidding. I have a BFG Tek 8800GTX that's been replaced five times since I got it. My game system used to be an overclocked affair with several hard drives, but over time I've reduced it to a 700W Corsair PSU, an un-overclockable Intel branded motherboard, one hard disk and stock Crucial RAM, thinking maybe my setup was killing the card... all in an enormous Antec P180 case, which has dedicated cooling for the graphics slot and multiple 120mm fans.
Fucking thing died again a couple weeks ago. Even when it's working "right" I can feel a spot on the side of my case that's got to be 50 F hotter than the same area three inches above or below that spot.
Securom has a tendency to disable optical drives. If you have more than one physical drive, or if you have software installed to mount.ISO files as drives, Securom will disable that software. It also tags some legitimate software (e.g. Process Explorer, which I use a lot to look for spyware on infected computers) as "hacking tools" and won't allow them to run.
The second game was as well, but the disc was encrypted or something and needed to download gigabytes of crap from Steam before it could be played. Basically the copy of the game that one could purchase in the store was a giant trojan that put Steam on your PC.
Gigabytes of downloads aren't exactly compatible with dialup internet connections. There was no way to just put in the physical disc that I bought and play the game.
Steam has an off line mode. It makes you check in every couple weeks. That's not offline enough. Offline means "this works perfectly well on a computer with no network connection at all." Which is something that I expect of a single player game.
Yes, today I have six different ways to get on the internet from my apartment, but that doesn't mean all those methods will always be available. I've been the tech guy at LAN parties where a network issue with Steam has killed the evening for some or most of the people attending.
I can also rant about the fact that Steam delivers advertising and an unwanted startup processes on a PC.
I really think it's a tragedy that a lot of great games are locked up in Steam. I played through all the Half-Life add-on packs, but I resent the way Steam operates so much I've never seen more than the opening screens of Half-Life 2.
The only problem is, then the grandparent will have to play it through Steam. I will resent until my dying day the idea that my computer should have to connect to the internet even occasionally so that I can play a single player game, and even moreso that even when I bought Half Life 2, I couldn't play the copy I paid for until I got a non-dialup internet connection.
Valve should at least give people the option of not dealing with their content distribution shit. Let people permanently opt out of multiplayer. Whatever.
Many years ago, I could swear I saw IBM (x86) branded PCs in a datacenter that were running AIX. I was handling Novell and Sun systems back then, but I was intensely curious about those machines and what they were doing. They were in the same chassis as my Netware systems, and looked completely different from the RS/6000s.
A couple vendors I use actually notate certain motherboards as being Intel by... but they arrive in the same packaging as all the others.
I don't care. I very strongly suspect that there's a difference in the quality of components that Intel specifies vs. what AMD and nVidia do for their designs. I further suspect that at least in some cases, the people making $40 AMD boards are cutting corners in order to be profitable at that price point.
'm sure I could buy 3 AMD boards for every two Intel, but there's a cost associated with putting a new one in, and frankly I'd rather that my machines just not have those kinds of hardware issues in the first place. The end point of motherboard reliability is really the deciding factor for me.
I'm normally maintaining computers by the fleet, by myself. I want identical machines that all perform the same way, use the same drivers and need a minimum of technician involvement.
My experience is that AMD-based motherboards, seemingly regardless of manufacturer, are much less reliable than Intel-made Intel motherboards, particularly after the first year of operation. I can provide exact numbers if you'd like, but generally what I see with vanilla Asus, Gigabyte and MSI board for AMD products are failure rates hovering about 20% per year after the first year. USB will stop working. Caps will leak. The onboard video dies.
In a given year, I might be responsible for building 300 new systems. Three years ago I started to transition from AMD to Intel. This is my first all-Intel year, but in three years I've RMA'd four Intel brand desktop motherboards, compared to dozens from Gigabyte/MSI/Asus over the same time period.
I certainly agree that Sempron is a generally better CPU than Celeron, but the thing that keeps me from looking at them is frustration with AMD motherboards and chipsets.
In Intel-land, I buy a made-by-Intel DG31PR or 945GCPE motherboard for about $60 and in either case I've got a board that is basically bulletproof, and even if it's not, I know that I'll be able to obtain a replacement and that Intel will seriously and consistently support that product.
In AMD-land, I can buy nVidia-based board with a bunch of idiotic hobbyist features that is always a tiny bit flakey, or I can buy one of a dozen AMD-based chipsets that are generally undifferentiated from one another and all available at approximately the same price. In either case, in a year and a half, when one of them breaks, I find that the manufacturer can't provide an exact replacement, won't replace unless I pay shipping both ways, has an utterly broken RMA process (coughAsuscough) or doesn't even have an office in the USA. The CPU might be $15 cheaper and the motherboard might be $20 cheaper, but I'm still not going through that through another generation of the machines I have to support.
Whatever the TinyXP people do goes beyond what a completely stripped and slipstreamed XP install is. TinyXP will install and operate on machines that XP won't even try to, like 32MB Pentium/75s. I've used nLite(in fact I use it pretty regularly to build install discs with extra drivers integrated). I can't even get close to making an XP install that's usable on that hardware.
I assume that if I spent a while screwing around with nLite and probably some of the other.inf files related to Windows installation, I could make something similar, but the work has already been done, and life is too short to putz around with stupid Windows tricks.
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I kind of like it when my mail server is, you know, just a mail server. Call me a nut but SMTP + IMAP do everything I need.
I have never played any version of the pen and paper D&D game in my life. I never had anyone to play with. But I was fascinated by the rulebooks for the first edition game and I bought them all when I was a kid.
I don't really want to play the game, but I've bought the core books just to read them and in some cases so that I could better understand the computer games that I do play, and because I usually enjoy the art.
4th Edition, I downloaded. I don't even remember where I got them. The books are very different as a product with every new release farther away from the old TSR products that I remember. I was really glad that I didn't pay for the new books. Everything about 4th edition D&D seems just an exercise in reaching new levels of lameness.
Personal printers are horribly unreliable and very expensive to maintain.
For as much as tuition costs these days, and for the fact that many schools assess a "Technology fee" on top of tuition, I think computer labs and printers on campus should absolutely be present.
Someone who lives off campus isn't going to want to cart their notebook around everyplace they go, and I know from experience that it's a lot easier to get work done in a distraction-free computer lab, compared to a noisy dorm room.
The crackers themselves are generally cool, I will agree, but there are some corners of the Internets that can get your PC in some seriously obnoxious shit if you aren't careful.
For example, you can read about this bit of nasty code that's distributed through image links on Warez sites. (I believe a free, painless registration is required to read the full article)
Basically, PC gaming is so massively unappealing at this point to me not because I need the latest hardware or to fiddle with drivers, but because I can't stand the copy protection on retail (packaged) games and what they might be doing to my PC, I can't tolerate Steam and its reliance on servers I may or may not have access to when I want to play, or cracked games, with the disturbing implications for PC security that come from non-official packages. Those three things don't leave me with a whole lot of options, especially since I hate console game control systems.
I bought Interstate '76, but it wouldn't work on any PC that had more than one optical drive, something that was never corrected. I loved the Mechwarrior games and I probably still have the disc.
Hm. Wonder if it'll run in a VM.
Try being a dial up user with a retail packaged copy of Half Life 2 that, according to the installer, would require 10 days of continuous, uninterrupted downloading through Steam before it could actually install and play.
Yes, really.
I'm sure it's much better now but just the fact that Steam installs and wants to be resident full-time on a PC is enough to keep me away from it, let alone the hilarity that is trying to have a LAN party when Steam's authentication servers are down.
I really do wish there were a way to enjoy some of Valve's titles on a PC without having to deal with their distribution shit. I've still never played Half Life 2.
I don't believe that's correct. NT4 had alpha-native code for the OS and as I recall Digital offered some software to translate x86 binaries into Alpha-native system calls in roughly the same way that WINE stuff runs Windows now.
I used to support Alphas and Motorola systems on NT4, and I did get to see a beta build of Windows 2000 on an Alpha at least once.
Historically, CoX has a very low churn rate compare to other MMOs. Many of the players are "lifers" who started when the game came out and won't be leaving until the last server is shut down.
CoX has a very user friendly gameplay and excellent text-based chat, and those things are really appealing to some people.
Champions, on the other hand, looks far too much like a console game for me to take it seriously.
That is my understanding as well. Current Via chips are extensions of the Centaur design. Cyrix was a technological dead end that didn't even own any fabrication facilities. Name brand had to be the only valuable thing they had.
I get a message that the service is down when I try it, and I have for the entire time I've had the beta installed.
I've been using Windows 7 on my Thinkpad for the last three weeks or so, and I've got a laundry list of bugs, issues and comments, and ironically one of the things that's broken in the beta release is the fucking "send feedback" feature.
I signed up for Microsoft Connect, and I still don't see any obvious way to submit bug reports. Maybe I have to be using IE or something.
And it's not like I haven't gotten Windows Updates in those three weeks. I think they don't really want any actual feedback. They're getting positive notes from the media, and Windows 7 will undoubtedly be far less reviled than Vista deservedly is, but the public beta has been out for a while; it's not like they could escape the fact that no one can send them bug reports.
I really think the fact that the "Send Feedback" button that's on every single open window in Windows 7 beta does not actually allow feedback to be sent is a deliberate move on the part of Microsoft.
No kidding. I have a BFG Tek 8800GTX that's been replaced five times since I got it. My game system used to be an overclocked affair with several hard drives, but over time I've reduced it to a 700W Corsair PSU, an un-overclockable Intel branded motherboard, one hard disk and stock Crucial RAM, thinking maybe my setup was killing the card... all in an enormous Antec P180 case, which has dedicated cooling for the graphics slot and multiple 120mm fans.
Fucking thing died again a couple weeks ago. Even when it's working "right" I can feel a spot on the side of my case that's got to be 50 F hotter than the same area three inches above or below that spot.
ASRock is the budget sub-brand of Asus.
Securom has a tendency to disable optical drives. If you have more than one physical drive, or if you have software installed to mount .ISO files as drives, Securom will disable that software. It also tags some legitimate software (e.g. Process Explorer, which I use a lot to look for spyware on infected computers) as "hacking tools" and won't allow them to run.
I alt-tabbed out of it on someone's PC once.
Paying for the game has no penalty to the publisher. The publisher must be punished for its stupidity.
Pirate it or don't play it at all.
This kind of shit is why I don't play games any more.
The original Half Life was sold on a CD.
The second game was as well, but the disc was encrypted or something and needed to download gigabytes of crap from Steam before it could be played. Basically the copy of the game that one could purchase in the store was a giant trojan that put Steam on your PC.
Gigabytes of downloads aren't exactly compatible with dialup internet connections. There was no way to just put in the physical disc that I bought and play the game.
Steam has an off line mode. It makes you check in every couple weeks. That's not offline enough. Offline means "this works perfectly well on a computer with no network connection at all." Which is something that I expect of a single player game.
Yes, today I have six different ways to get on the internet from my apartment, but that doesn't mean all those methods will always be available. I've been the tech guy at LAN parties where a network issue with Steam has killed the evening for some or most of the people attending.
I can also rant about the fact that Steam delivers advertising and an unwanted startup processes on a PC.
I really think it's a tragedy that a lot of great games are locked up in Steam. I played through all the Half-Life add-on packs, but I resent the way Steam operates so much I've never seen more than the opening screens of Half-Life 2.
The only problem is, then the grandparent will have to play it through Steam. I will resent until my dying day the idea that my computer should have to connect to the internet even occasionally so that I can play a single player game, and even moreso that even when I bought Half Life 2, I couldn't play the copy I paid for until I got a non-dialup internet connection.
Valve should at least give people the option of not dealing with their content distribution shit. Let people permanently opt out of multiplayer. Whatever.
Many years ago, I could swear I saw IBM (x86) branded PCs in a datacenter that were running AIX. I was handling Novell and Sun systems back then, but I was intensely curious about those machines and what they were doing. They were in the same chassis as my Netware systems, and looked completely different from the RS/6000s.
A couple vendors I use actually notate certain motherboards as being Intel by... but they arrive in the same packaging as all the others.
I don't care. I very strongly suspect that there's a difference in the quality of components that Intel specifies vs. what AMD and nVidia do for their designs. I further suspect that at least in some cases, the people making $40 AMD boards are cutting corners in order to be profitable at that price point.
'm sure I could buy 3 AMD boards for every two Intel, but there's a cost associated with putting a new one in, and frankly I'd rather that my machines just not have those kinds of hardware issues in the first place. The end point of motherboard reliability is really the deciding factor for me.
I'm normally maintaining computers by the fleet, by myself. I want identical machines that all perform the same way, use the same drivers and need a minimum of technician involvement.
My experience is that AMD-based motherboards, seemingly regardless of manufacturer, are much less reliable than Intel-made Intel motherboards, particularly after the first year of operation. I can provide exact numbers if you'd like, but generally what I see with vanilla Asus, Gigabyte and MSI board for AMD products are failure rates hovering about 20% per year after the first year. USB will stop working. Caps will leak. The onboard video dies.
In a given year, I might be responsible for building 300 new systems. Three years ago I started to transition from AMD to Intel. This is my first all-Intel year, but in three years I've RMA'd four Intel brand desktop motherboards, compared to dozens from Gigabyte/MSI/Asus over the same time period.
I certainly agree that Sempron is a generally better CPU than Celeron, but the thing that keeps me from looking at them is frustration with AMD motherboards and chipsets.
In Intel-land, I buy a made-by-Intel DG31PR or 945GCPE motherboard for about $60 and in either case I've got a board that is basically bulletproof, and even if it's not, I know that I'll be able to obtain a replacement and that Intel will seriously and consistently support that product.
In AMD-land, I can buy nVidia-based board with a bunch of idiotic hobbyist features that is always a tiny bit flakey, or I can buy one of a dozen AMD-based chipsets that are generally undifferentiated from one another and all available at approximately the same price. In either case, in a year and a half, when one of them breaks, I find that the manufacturer can't provide an exact replacement, won't replace unless I pay shipping both ways, has an utterly broken RMA process (coughAsuscough) or doesn't even have an office in the USA. The CPU might be $15 cheaper and the motherboard might be $20 cheaper, but I'm still not going through that through another generation of the machines I have to support.
There are CS classes that can have girls in them?
I ascended with a wishless tourist once, and I consider that more of an accomplishment than my bachelor's degree.
Yes I most certainly do.
Whatever the TinyXP people do goes beyond what a completely stripped and slipstreamed XP install is. TinyXP will install and operate on machines that XP won't even try to, like 32MB Pentium/75s. I've used nLite(in fact I use it pretty regularly to build install discs with extra drivers integrated). I can't even get close to making an XP install that's usable on that hardware.
I assume that if I spent a while screwing around with nLite and probably some of the other .inf files related to Windows installation, I could make something similar, but the work has already been done, and life is too short to putz around with stupid Windows tricks.